Nowadays, almost everybody has a smartphone. Many use their smartphone for messaging, email, taking pictures, etc., but in reality, the birth of the smartphone came from early cellular phones that provided only voice communications. Each smartphone has a unique phone number; unique world-wide when the country code is included.
As people often find it easier to remember a person's or an establishment's name as opposed to a ten-digit phone number, phone directories came about just as in the past, phone books and rotary phone indexes were used for landline phones. The concept was initially simple—an entry (e.g. card or record) was indexed by the person's or establishment's name and contained an address and phone number of the person or establishment.
As smartphones became popular, similar systems were created through software on the smartphones. Such “phonebooks” are used mostly to store records containing phone numbers of people and establishments that are commonly called. These phonebooks are typically indexed by the person's or establishment's name or alias such as “mom,” “dad,” “Joe's Pizzeria,” etc. This made using smartphones much easier as both voice calling and messaging is now directed, for example, to “mom.”
As capabilities and storage of smartphones increased, more information has been stored in each user's phonebook, including addresses, birthdates, anniversaries, personal information, work/office information, vehicle identification numbers, etc.
Everybody who has a smartphone has a phone book, but in general, all phonebook entries are entered manually (at least initially) or through various automated schemes such as scanning of business cards using the smartphone's camera or electronic transfer from one phone to another phone using virtual business cards (e.g. VCF). In such, when a new smartphone is purchased, the phonebook must be transferred from the old smartphone to the new smartphone as storage for the phonebook records was within the memory of the user's smartphone.
Being that phonebook records are created manually, data accuracy depends upon whoever enters the data; usually using the smartphone's on-screen keyboard and limit display size. This often leads to errors, duplicate entries, etc. Further, certain complexities are often overlooked by users such as multiple phone number entries for home, office, cell, etc., making difficult to determine which number to call at a later time.
Updating locally stored phonebook records is also a tenuous ordeal. When one of your contacts changes their phone number, email address, name (e.g. after marriage), address, etc., that person usually sends out a message to everybody in their phonebook requesting that everybody make updates. This is not an easy task since there are many records in one's phonebook that are one-way (e.g. calls are only made to a restaurant, not from the restaurant), many records are not up-to-date (e.g. the phone number is wrong), and some records one does not want to send requests for updates (e.g. ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend). If the contact information in your phonebook is outdated, you cannot inform that person of your new contact information and will likely lose touch with that person.
Personal phonebook records become the property of the smartphone owner, in that, once created, it is up to the smartphone owner to guard the information and there is no way to limit the life of the information in any way except to ask the smartphone owner to delete your information.
In addition, smartphone records are flat. If you give someone your business card or VCF, that person gets all of the information on your business card or VCF. For paper business cards, if you do not want that person to have your cellular number, you have to blackout that part of the business card, but once provide to the person, there is no taking it back.
What is needed is a system that will provide a ubiquitous and unique management of contact records across multiple platforms.